Nearly two decades ago, Kent Lightfoot issued the first serious call in American archaeology to scrutinize the disciplinary divide between prehistory and history in a 1995 article in American Antiquity. Several recent archaeological volumes have taken this call to heart, advancing the critique in new and important ways (for example the papers in Oland, Hart, and Frink's 2012 Decolonizing Indigenous Histories; in Scheiber and Mitchell's 2010 Across a Great Divide; or more recently in Schmidt and Mrozowski's 2013 The Death of Prehistory). Such studies consider the continuities and changes that span prehistory and history, formerly treated as two independent eras. Altogether, these approaches seek to understand how prehistoric indigenous practices, technologies, social relations, and beliefs influenced and adjusted to European colonial encroachment. Rather than relegating indigenous peoples and histories (written or not) to the background of various European expansion projects, these works recognize the importance of Native American agency, resilience, and creativity in such contexts.

Arnn's Land of the Tejas attests to the positive contributions that archaeology offers the study of long-term histories and the intersections and entanglements of indigenous North Americans and newcomers. He demonstrates that archaeology's unique long-view perspective is a powerful tool for exploring the cultural complexities associated with the transition from pre-European to colonial North America.

Arnn focuses specifically on hunter-gatherers living in the Texas region between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries. Unlike other recent works—typically edited collections or theoretical analyses—that challenge the prehistory/history divide, this well-written book provides an in-depth treatment of a single regional context. It successfully synthesizes an impressive range of data to highlight the cultural dynamics of hunter-gatherer identities over a four hundred-year span. Land of the Tejas also uses its anthropological and archaeological perspective on hunter-gatherers to speak to broader problems of the human condition in the modern world, addressing issues related to human-environmental interactions and sustainability. For its synthesis of a specified region, its archaeological perspective, and its intervention on identity formation, all readers interested in Texas history, hunter-gatherers, social identity, and broader issues of scale and temporality will find Arnn's book relevant and enlightening.